Just Call me “Half Plonk,” and I will Call You “Tree”! By James Reed
It is fine now to identify as a tree, as part of gender relativism/nihilism. So, from now on, I will identify by the one thing that gives meaning to my life, a half-drunk bottle of plonk! Just call me James Half Plonk! Well, the strongest guy in the world is Viking Halfthor, so what’s wrong with Half Plonk? Say, it should be an interesting fight between Viking Halfthor and English man Eddie Hall this year, the two strongest guys in the world. It is seeming to ignite all rivalries going back13 hundred years. Well, that is one sales pitch that could be given.
“The Wikipedia page for actor Keiynan Lonsdale became a battlefield in the fight over “preferred pronouns” due to a Twitter thread noting Lonsdale once suggested “tree” as his preferred pronoun. Despite doubts about Lonsdale’s sincerity, editors repeatedly changed the male pronouns on his article to “tree” this past week until an editor sought a compromise by removing pronouns entirely. One editor who criticized the move and denigrated the idea of “tree” as a pronoun was banned for a week.
Disputes over LGBT issues on Wikipedia have continuously moved towards greater restrictions on the speech of editors with the recently approved “code of conduct” specifically requiring the use of “preferred pronouns” on Wikipedia and affiliated sites.
Lonsdale is an Australian actor who played the Wally West iteration of the Flash in the CW television series about the DC comic book superhero. During a 2018 discussion on Instagram Lonsdale responded to a fan query about his sexuality by also referencing preferred pronouns saying: “I don’t want to go by ‘he’ anymore, I just want to go by ‘tree.’ I want people to call me ‘tree,’ because we all come from trees . . . I want to call my friends ‘tree’ and me ‘tree’ and everyone ‘tree.’ So, I think, like now, when people ask me what my preferred pronoun is, I’m going to say ‘tree.’”
Editors on Wikipedia have tried to add the “tree” pronoun to Lonsdale’s page on Wikipedia since then, and were repeatedly rejected. While Wikipedia guidelines currently expect editors to use preferred pronouns for transgender individuals in certain cases, non-standard pronouns or “neopronouns” have been contentious and editors have favored using gender-neutral pronouns such as “they” instead. Fighting over Lonsdale’s “tree” pronoun claims on his Wikipedia page intensified after a viral Twitter thread brought up the past comments and encouraged people to use “tree” as the pronoun for Lonsdale:
A flurry of people subsequently descended on the article to change the male pronouns to “tree” and established editors repeatedly undid these changes. Other than established editors undoing the pronoun changes the anti-vandalism bot account “ClueBot” also undid edits changing Lonsdale’s male pronouns in the article to “tree” after automatically detecting the edits as possible vandalism. The Twitter user who began the thread about Lonsdale’s pronoun comments praised those trying to change the pronouns on the Wikipedia article to “tree” and suggested editors were “transphobes” for undoing the edits
With people continuing to restore the pronoun change, an administrator used his special privileges to lock or “protect” the article for a few days, preventing new accounts and unregistered users from editing Lonsdale’s page. However, the lock still allowed editors with more experience to edit the page and several such accounts also restored the pronoun change only for their edits to be undone as well. Administrator Molly White, known as “GorillaWarfare” on Wikipedia, increased the protection level on the page to lock out editors with accounts less than a month old or that have made fewer than 500 edits. White has also served several years on the Arbitration Committee, often likened to a Supreme Court.
Shortly after imposing the stricter lock on the page, White removed pronouns from Lonsdale’s article entirely, citing this as a compromise that would “avoid using the wrong pronouns” without using pronouns other editors would reject. White also added Lonsdale’s pronoun comments to the article. In explaining the move, White took Lonsdale as sincere and rejected using a gender-neutral alternative such as “they” claiming it was not appropriate “for those who have specified different pronouns.” Editor “EEng” objected to this remark by disputing that Lonsdale was even serious, noting his PR representatives consistently used male pronouns, and added: “The idea that tree is a pronoun is, bluntly, idiocy.”
No, today pronouns can be anything you want, even a verb, like I am “running,” the essence of human movement. Or, I am the number 2. Yes, that is a new one, and I am thinking them up all the time as the cheap plonk increases my cognitive and writing abilities, as well as cutting some of the pain in my neck. That is one of the joys of countless hours at the keyboard, an eternal pain in the neck.
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